SHOW DESCRIPTION

On National Coffee Day, Paul Wolf steps away from his usual interview format to talk about what specialty coffee means to him personally, from his first cup at Sneaky Beans in 2010 to his current hobby-level obsession with process and ratios. Woven through his reflection are two voices from Jackson's coffee scene: Trey Malone of Northshore Specialty Roasters, recorded on the podcast JXN’s Table (with Geno Lee), and Matt Flinn of Native Coffee Company. Together they talk about coffee as a "third place," what actually separates a washed process from a natural one, and why both men came back to Jackson on purpose to build something here. It's less a history lesson than a love letter to the city's coffee culture.

TRANSCRIPT

Note: Soul Sessions is produced as a podcast first and designed to be listened to. If you are able, we strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which includes the emotion and inflection meant to be conveyed by human voice. Our transcripts are created using AI and human transcribers, but may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting.

INTRO

Why Coffee Means So Much to Paul Wolf on National Coffee Day

PAUL

My first cup of coffee wasn't really a choice. It was survival. I had just started a new business and, well, you know, caffeine, and I had moved into the Fondren Corner building. That was 2010. Right next door to Sneaky Beans. And I figured if I was gonna live beside a coffee shop, I probably needed to learn to like the stuff. So I walked in and ordered BeanFruit coffee, roasted locally by a man named Paul Bonds. No cream, no sugar. Just black coffee, and I still take it that way today.

But here's the truth about me. I love flavor, period. Give me a hoppy IPA or a good stout, proper bourbon or barbecue that's doing something interesting with sweet and savory, maybe even a good scoop of ice cream. If it's got complexity, I'm in.

And over the last year, that's led me back to specialty coffee. Except this time it's closer to a hobby than a habit.

Hey, it's Paul Wolf with a front row seat to Conversations on Culture from Jackson, Mississippi. We call our podcast Soul Sessions. It's the people, places, and events that make the City With Soul shine. National Coffee Day is September 26th, and as you've probably figured out, I'm a big specialty coffee guy. So this one's personal for me.

The more I learn about it, the more I can't unsee what's actually in the cup. You know, every pour is somewhere around 30 hand-picked coffee cherries, if you're drinking specialty coffee, picked by someone whose family doesn't know until harvest whether the weather cooperated or whether the crop even came in. Once you understand that, a $20 bag, or even a $20 cup, stops feeling like an upcharge. It feels like an honest price for what it actually took to get it there. And we've got shops right here in Jackson doing the work that earns it.

These days, I still take my coffee black, but I've gotten really particular about how I get there. French press some mornings, AeroPress others, pour over when I've got the time. Sometimes it's just the cheap machine on the counter, and that's fine too, as long as I've weighed the beans and gotten the water ratio right. Some people call me a coffee nerd for that, but that part, the care in the process, that's the thing I didn't understand back in 2010. And it's the thing I can't stop thinking about now.

If you want the full lineage of how this city built its coffee scene, shop by shop, roaster by roaster, I've written that up and you'll find the link in our show notes, and it's on our blog right now. But today, that isn't the story. Today I want to talk to you about why coffee here means something to me, and let a couple of people who feel the same way explain it even better than I can.

There's a reason people don't say, let's grab a caffeine fix. They say, let's grab a cup of coffee. And what they mean is let's sit down and talk. That's the whole thing for me. It's never been about the drink. It's about the people. Trey Malone at Northshore Specialty Roasters put it even better than I can, on our limited series podcast, Jackson's Table, hosted by Geno Lee of the Big Apple Inn.

Trey Malone on Coffee as a “Third Space” in Jackson, Mississippi

TREY

One of my mentors in life, he actually uses the phrase of creating table, creating spaces where people can sit down across the table from each other and share their lives. Cause I truly think that that's the one thing this world needs more of, right? Because there would be a lot less fighting and a lot less bickering if we just got to know each other. If we got to sit across the table with a cup of coffee, a beverage, or a plate of food and hear our life stories. And so that's what drew me to the whole concept of the third space, right? So coffee being kind of a conduit for that third space, where it's not your home, it's not your work, but it's somewhere else where you go to know and be known. And I think coffee is a great vehicle for that.

GENO

Man. So right here in Jackson, Trey, you have a few things. You have your roastery here, is that right?

TREY

The roast. The roastery. Yeah.

GENO

And then you have an actual a store. Yep. Which is in the district.

TREY

We have two actually. So we have one at the district at Eastover. And then we opened that in February of last year. And then 30 days after that, we open up our second one. And that's in Belhaven, where I actually live. Me and my family live down the street from this one.

So the one in the district's called Northshore Specialty Coffee, and the one in Belhaven is called Cultivate Coffee Project. We gave that a different name because we're partnering with the brewery in Belhaven, Fertile Ground, to start that coffee shop. And so, yep, they're both just amazing, incredible places that we are able to really host people. And the concept of hospitality in your hometown is so important. And the gift that it's given me as being a business owner, of being able to present things that I find beautiful to people and to watch the community that happens around it, is something that's just incredible.

Tasting Washed vs. Natural Process Coffee with Northshore Specialty Roasters

PAUL

Right. That's the same care that shows up the second you actually taste the coffee, not just where you drink it. Back on Jackson's Table, Trey walked Geno through two coffees processed two completely different ways, side by side.

TREY

This is from Honduras and is just an excellent clean cup of coffee. We roast this one a little bit lighter, so you get to try a lot more of the terroir and the soil that I was talking about.

GENO

Okay. And I'm noticing here how it's not black, you know, it's kind of like a very caramel color.

TREY

It looks almost like a tea, doesn't it? Yeah. And so it's lighter roasted, and that doesn't bring out as much of the color. So most of the colors we see in beverages come from some type of roast that's in the process, including beer and bourbon, like all of that stuff. So for coffee, see this one's a little bit darker because it's a little bit darker roasted. When we pick a roast profile for a coffee, it's all about cleaning the window to what that coffee has to offer. We don't want to impart flavor, because, you know, there's some companies out in Seattle that they really wanted to buy whatever coffee they could find and have a homogeneous flavor profile. And you can do that by roasting it dark. Just like with steak. Like if you have a really cheap steak or a really expensive steak, if you do it well done, they're going to taste about the same, right? So if you convince a community of people that they really enjoy dark roasted coffee, then you can have the same flavor. We think that some coffees taste great when they're a little bit darker roasted. We have some of those roast notes that almost supplement the flavors that are inherent to the coffee. But we think a lot of coffees also taste really good light roasted, where you just unlock the sweetness and the flavor profile from the coffee and you present it as it is.

TREY

So…

GENO

Wow.

TREY

Cheers!

TREY

So what I taste is I get like a caramel sweetness. There's almost like a sugariness that comes with it, you know, almost like a candy bar or a nougat.

GENO

I was gonna say that. And if I didn't see you go straight from grinding the beans and bringing it over, I would have thought that you mixed it with something.

TREY

Really? I love that. This is just all flavors that God created in the soil. Yeah. All we did was just roast it. We really like to, in our industry, so we're specifically specialty coffee, and it's a little different than any other commodity coffee industry. And what we want to do is we want to highlight what the producers have done in these countries of origin. They're the ones that have painstakingly broken their backs, carrying coffee seeds up mountains, picking one cherry at a time. If you have a cup of coffee in the morning, you're drinking about 30 cherries that someone picked by hand, which is pretty humbling to think about, cause I might slam four cups of coffee in a day and not even think about it.

Matt Flinn on Making Specialty Coffee Feel Welcoming at Native Coffee Company

PAUL

Here's the thing about specialty coffee, and I'll admit this myself: it can feel a little insider-y. Tasting notes, process methods, terroir, all of that starts to feel a little like homework instead of a drink you actually enjoy. I still don't order cream and sugar in mine. And listen, I don't think that makes you any less of a coffee person. Whatever floats your boat; you do you.

But Matt Flinn at Native Coffee Company talked to me about exactly how you build something knowledgeable without making people feel like they need a certification to walk in the door.

MATT

That actually is kind of the premise on why we started Native Coffee in the first place. So I had the opportunity to work for Black & White for a little bit when I was in North Carolina. Originally the coffee shop that I worked for and roastery was called Back Alley Coffee. And Kyle with Black and White, he and Li joined together after his World Barista Championship run. So Kyle and I, both being from Mississippi, really hit it off and got to learn a ton from him. And one of the things that they really try to push home there at Black and White is that if it tastes good, it is good. And we really kind of built that into our model here in Jackson at Native. One of the things that we always say is quality coffee for quality people. We really believe that the people of Jackson are quality people, and we do that with serving just incredibly sourced coffees. So one of the things that we wanted to do really was to be very knowledgeable about coffee, but present it in a way that shows our passion for it rather than, I don't know, to kind of have some sort of special knowledge about something. Because in the end, it's coffee. We love coffee, but in the end it's a beverage. And it's not some sort of special knowledge and revelation that we all have or whatever, but it's something to share instead. And so that's the way that we see it, is we want to know a lot about coffee, we want to make it really well, but we really want to share that with other people.

PAUL

What is your coffee routine like? I mean, has it changed how you drink coffee and how you enjoy coffee by owning a coffee shop?

MATT

Owning a business does change everything in so many ways. You have constant access to stuff. I think a lot of people would think, “Hey, the guys over at Fertile Ground probably just drink beer all the time,” you know? But that isn't really the case. I've talked to several of them, and have a beer here and there now, but you end up having constant access to something and so you don't drink it as much. With me, I have access to really awesome coffees all the time. So typically my routine is I go in in the morning, a lot of times I have a cappuccino, and then I may cup through some coffees. But for the most part, my day looks like coming into work, sitting down, having a cappuccino or a drip coffee, and that's kind of what I use to get into my work. And then I typically am not drinking coffee in the afternoon as much, and trying to really chug a lot of water throughout the day. So that's really kind of my thing, because I do taste a lot of coffee, I'll taste a lot of espresso on bar, but my sit-down routine is really to go in and have a pour over, have a cappuccino, and kind of limit it there, honestly.

Soapbox Coffee's Debut Blend: Starting Line and the Red Fruits Co-Ferment

PAUL

What gets me about this city's coffee scene right now is that nobody's treating it as finished. People who already built something are still building. Matt and his wife Anna spent years running Native before they touched a roaster themselves. And this year, that changed.

MATT

Yeah, we started a roasting program. We're actually sourcing our green coffee through Black and White and able to get a lot of the access to coffees that they have as well. Our first blend that we're doing is called Starting Line. And that kind of gets to a little bit of the business aspect of it, is that our coffee roasting program actually isn't Native. It's a whole other company called Soapbox, as in a soapbox racer, like a car. That's the new brand that we're building out. And so our first blend is an Ethiopian, it's a washed Ethiopian Yirgacheff, and also a Colombian coffee that is a co-ferment.

PAUL

And I love a good co-ferment.

MATT

Yeah, it's a lot of fun. So this co-ferment is from Sebastian Ramirez, it's called Red Fruits. They fermented it anaerobically for 120 hours with freeze-dried strawberries, wine yeast, and fruit pectin. And so it has some awesome intense flavors of strawberry and cherry and chocolate, and depending on how you roast it, you can get a lot of brightness out of it and really push that fruit, or you can get into more of the baker's chocolate that's going on with that. It's really cool.

PAUL

I've got to get a bag for myself. Everybody's got a story to tell, and you're telling a story in Jackson with coffee. What is that story, Matt?

MATT

Really, from the beginning, we wanted to establish a shop that was like a third place for folks, a place where people wanted to come and hang out and enjoy a cup of coffee with a friend, to meet up, to catch up, but also to have a really great product that they got to enjoy at the same time. And so, I mean, at first it was kind of scary. We launched the first week of the shutdown, but with a little bit of ingenuity and hard work, we were able to make it happen. And then people came and pulled up to spots. And over the years we just grew, even out of the pandemic. Yeah, it's been a success so far. One of the things I think has been integral in the success of Native, and how we've interacted with the neighborhood of Belhaven and just Jackson in general, is our staff. We have very little turnover at Native. A lot of folks had come and work there and just want to stay, and have really developed their skills in coffee. One of the things that our employees love even more than coffee is people. And so that, I think, has really contributed to our success, and is just the amount of folks that we have working there who love talking with people every morning, love making people's coffee, love serving them, and love doing it day in and day out. We've constantly been trying to learn, develop our skills, use really high quality ingredients. And I honestly think that embodies just what we've done here in the South all along in the first place, is that, you know, you grew up having vegetables in the garden and mom cooking stuff and dad grilling things and all that kind of very food oriented. And that's one thing that I'll always love is taste. And so I really wanted to — my wife and I got together and talked about what we wanted in a shop, and it was, hey, let's have some local milk that we can use and let's source some of the best coffee in the world, and really bring that to our hometown, because that's what we would want to have ourselves.

Why Trey Malone and Matt Flinn Came Back to Build Coffee Businesses in Jackson

PAUL

I love to travel and I've had good coffee in a lot of places. But what I haven't had anywhere else is this: people who left Jackson, tasted what was out there, and came back on purpose to build something here instead. That's true of more than one person in this city's coffee scene, and it's part of why I moved to Fondren in the first place. And Trey talked about that pull on Jackson's Table too.

TREY

And it kind of comes down to this one phrase. Do you remember when we started, they opened our Whole Foods in Jackson?

GENO

Yeah, I do.

TREY

And you know, Whole Foods is a chain, and you know what, now, this is before Jeff Bezos bought it, but I came in and they had the best mural on the wall where it said “rooted in fertile soil.” And I just love that. I love that concept. And so, this is before I moved to California, a lot of people that own businesses in Jackson, they moved out and they got a taste of the world, and then they came back. And that's my story. And it's really because this is my home. This is where I've been planted, and this is where I want to grow, and this is where I want to have an impact. I've lived in towns all across the east and west coast, and I could have done this there, and I could have been a part of a culture that was already created. But in Jackson, Mississippi, I get to be a part of creating that culture. I get to be a part of watching this beautiful tree of Jackson grow into something that we can all be proud of, and we're already seeing the fruit of that. And so I love this community. I love that I get to raise my girls here, and I love that I get to grow old here, being a part of what's being built.

Closing

PAUL

That's Trey Malone of Northshore Specialty Roasters and Matt Flinn of Native Coffee Company. Fifteen years ago, I didn't even like coffee. Now I can't imagine my morning without it, and a lot of that is because of people like them, people who decided this city deserves something worth building carefully. And that's really what today's episode is about. Not a full history, you can get that on the blog, just what it feels like to love this stuff in a place where the people making it care this much. If you want that full story, the whole lineage of how the Jackson coffee scene is built, there are links in our show notes, along with links to Northshore, Native, Cups, Just Vanilla, Soulé, The Bean, and so much more, at visitjackson.com/soulsessions.

One more thing before I let you go. I'm also fortunate to be a part of another podcast here in Jackson, produced right here in the city, called Taste of Place. It digs into all of this: beer, wine, spirits, food, and yeah, coffee. I've learned a ton being part of that show, and I think you would too, so give it a listen wherever you get your podcast. We'll have a link to it in our show notes as well.

Soul Sessions comes to you from Visit Jackson, the destination organization for Jackson, Mississippi, the City With Soul. Our executive producers are Jonathan Pettus and Dr. Rickey Thigpen, and I'm Paul Wolf, coffee aficionado and managing editor and host for these conversations. Everything Jackson, events, stories, places to go, it all lives at our website, visitjackson.com.

Hey, if you've got a story idea or a question about the City With Soul, I want to hear from you. So reach out, it's pwolf@visitjackson.com. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you again soon.

Listen to previous episodes of Soul Sessions